Pancake: Frequency Smoothing for Encrypted Data Stores

Abstract

Pancake is the first system to protect key-value stores from access-pattern leakage attacks with small constant-factor bandwidth overhead. It uses frequency smoothing to transform plaintext accesses into uniformly distributed encrypted accesses and proves security against passive, persistent adversaries in a new formal model. Integrated with three production key-value stores, Pancake achieves 229 times the throughput of non-recursive Path ORAM and runs within 3–6 times of insecure baselines.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{pancake,
  author = {Grubbs*, Paul and Khandelwal*, Anurag and Lacharit{\'e}*, Marie-Sarah and Brown, Lloyd and Li, Lucy and Agarwal, Rachit and Ristenpart, Thomas},
  title = {{Pancake: Frequency Smoothing for Encrypted Data Stores}},
  booktitle = {USENIX Security},
  month = aug,
  year = {2020},
  award = {Distinguished Paper Award},
  note = {(*Equal contribution authors)}
}